@Elvin Yung <@shikaku.ramen>

(part of the Secret Pro Techniques ramen nerdery series)

current status: matches mostly confirmed, may need further experiment for further confirmation

Japanese noodlemaking designates cutters (切刃, kiriba or sometimes kiriha) using the bante (番手) system: for a 30mm wide sheet, a cutter is numbered according to the amount of strands of noodles it will cut the sheet into. As a representative example, a 16-ban cutter cuts a 30mm wide sheet into 16 strands of noodles, and is therefore considered to be ~1.88mm wide. This page provides a brief listing of common cutters used in ramen, what styles/shops usually use it, and how one might emulate them using Marcato Atlas 150 cutters.

Minor nomenclature note: in English we usually refer to cutters directly by number in terms of e.g. "#16 cutter", but I have generally tended to use the slightly more literal phrasing of "16-ban" (or "16番").

It's also worth noting that noodle cuts are generally split into three types: kakugiri (角切) or square-cut, hiragiri (平切) or flat cut, and marugiri (丸切) or round-cut. I've attempted to keep this in mind when matching specific styles to specific cutters, but because of limited options this might not always be a perfect match.

Each cutter also generally has a standard thickness (and cutting a sheet thicker than the cutter's thickness causes gyaku-kiri 逆切 or reverse-cutting, sometimes also called tate-kiri 縦切), which I've excluded for space reasons, although the Marcato cutter column also partially takes this into consideration.

Kiriba Bante-Marcato Cutter Approximation Guide

Sources and Further Reading

切刃番手

番手と麺幅の特徴はココ!麺の太さとスープの深い関係! | 1玉40円からの製麺所

切刃(番手)・加水率比較表

お水をどうぞ

With Thanks To

Secret Pro Techniques